For the complete article, visit the following link:
http://www.hellogiggles.com/teens-tech-end-cyberbullying/ |
"Use in School Suspension to Teach Skills" YouTube. Web. 21 Mar 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm5tOHYUxBs>.
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In Polly Bath’s YouTube video, school administrators are reminded once again of the futility of suspensions and its role in perpetuating the negative behaviours of the bullies. Without learning the correct behaviours or understanding the bully and how to empower them in prosocial ways, the bully becomes comfortable with accepting that they do not have an expectation to improve or the resources to facilitate their growth. The third intervention suggests using the skills of cyberbullies for positive purposes. For example, if a bully has made a website about the victim, we make put their skills to use for professional purposes such as contributing to the development of the school’s website. The Happiness Hackathon is one such example of an initative developed by Coca-Cola and DoSomething.org to creatively address cyberbullying in a productive way. However, this alternative model is not an effective stand-alone solution. The Happiness Hackathon initiative targets one aspect of the conflict, which are the bully’s cyber skills and how to correct this for prosocial reasons. However, on its own, this solution does not provide any strategies for actual conflict resolution between the bully and victim and how to communicate appropriately. Morris (2000) in the reading, What is Transformative Justice, points out that “the victim, offender, and others affected are usually very unclear about what is happening, on issues that affect them powerfully." Therefore, it is essential that, as part of this alternative model, we compliment it with components such as attending Role-Playing Workshops, and having the discussion necessary to understand why the cyber bullying conflict occurred, to understand the feelings of the victim and bully, and to learn how to communicate issues between the bully and victim in a safe manner. There is also no guarantee that by advancing the cyber bully’s website skills that they will not return to create a sophisticated cyber attack on the victim to punish them for exposing them to the school administrator.